A piece of history

Sure, a planer. I ran one for a while with a 15 ft. bed and that was hardly a "big" one.

Really quite the thing for producing flat surfaces. We used to bolt down the table full of table saw tables (a little redundancy there :-) and make one roughing pass and one finish pass.

Cool! Looks like a very early scraper.

-- "The history of temperature change over time is related to the shape of the continents, the shape of the sea floor, the pulling apart of the crust, the stitching back together of the crust, the opening and closing of sea ways, changes in the Earth's orbit, changes in solar energy, supernoval eruptions, comet dust, impacts by comets and asteroids, volcanic activity, bacteria, soil formation, sedimentation, ocean currents, and the chemistry of air. If we humans, in a fit of ego, think we can change these normal planetary processes, then we need stronger medication." --Ian Plimer _Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science_

It looks a lot like a Wood, Light and Company planer made about the time of the Civil War.

Dan

It looks a lot like a Wood, Light and Company planer made about the time of the Civil War.

Dan

Wow that realy is old. The electric motor would have been added much later. It looks like its complete and nothing is broken off. To bad its so far away from me, i would like to own it. Shure would look cute in the shop.

Best Regards Tom.

Link does not work for me. does not even look right?

Remove 333 to reply. Randy

That's a little old planer. It's really old -- much older than the 1917 vertical mill I recently got rid of.

Planers that small fell out of favor as milling machines got better and more popular. But the really big ones are still in use -- although most of them have been converted to planer/mills.

Perhaps try it as

instead of

The auction is "PUTNAM MACHINE Co. METAL PLANER 110V motor shaper tool" Item number: 350470886671 Item location: Milroy, Indiana,

Yeah, but could you get a CNC conversion?

(...)

It'd make a dandy base for a CNC bridge mill!

--Winston

Yeah Baby! Steampunk CNC! :)

--Winston

It is terribly formatted. Two open parens, a bang '!', and a $ (lead in for an environment variable in unix, not to metnion the double tildes. :-)

I could not download it with wget (even with proper quoting to protect the wierdnesses), but by cut and pasting it into a browser I was able to get to it -- then save the image with a sane name.

Enjoy, DoN.

Windows/Firefox choked either on the $ or the open parens. I cut and pasted the rest and it came right up. What a PITA!

I grabbed Google's URL shortener and it spits out nice, tiny URLs. It's a Firefox add-on which puts a little circular G button on the location bar. I click it, it loads my clipboard, and I can paste it anywhere. I switched from another shortener (which wasn't updated for Firefox at the time) and am happy with it.

-- Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. -- Mahatma Gandhi

Yup. Table was about 6' x 16', post WWII, but just. There were actually WWII and pre-WWII era machines still in use at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in the early 80s. Seemed out of place next to the CNCs.

In slrn, I just hit over the link, and watched it open fine in links. :-)

We had about 15 of them where I worked in the early 80's though they were larger and had been converted into hydraulic tracer mills.

I didn't see any interesting antiques in their machine shop at the June 2000 open house. They had the biggest lathes I've ever seen, holding Boomer propellor shafts.

jsw

Open house is usually to impress you, not to show the shop as it really is. ;-) That was 30 years ago, so it's VERY likely that all the pre-WWII stuff is gone by now. At the time, very little was 50 years old. If that holds, you might see a few things from the 60's.

Building 300 was under construction when I worked there. Most of the older machines were in the older, now demolished, building 86. The big planer used to be at the other end of the building. IOW, follow the axis of that lathe from headstock to tailstock and keep going til you hit wall.

One of the more "fun" operations was putting bearing sleeves on those boomer shafts. Sleeve had to be heated to... hmm... 500?, and then slid along quite a length of that shaft by crane, guided by two men in silver suits, in a hurry before it cooled off. If it got stuck... back on the lathe, cut the sleeve off, and start all over again.

The hone we used for the sleeves was horizontal, so it couldn't just sit there. The weight of the honing head would cause it to cut more on the bottom than the rest of the circumference. It had to rotate. We used a rope soaked in honing oil wrapped around the sleeve a couple times. Hold taut. Every now and again, give a bit of slack so the hone would rotate the sleeve to let gravity work on a different section of it.

I'm sure most of the machines that were there then are no longer.

Worked OK for me with Firefox 4.0.1

Yep.... up to a 14' X 12' X 48'

and I have the little brother 3' X 3' X 18' sitting in my shop....